Dial up :D

flight said:

also, here's a sound that may be familiar with some of you...

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Considering how much I was around my parents back before I was five years old, yeah that sound is a memory lol

Also, did anybody here not have AOL as their ISP in the glory days of dial-up?

We always had local ISPs when we had dialup, so no AOL. I live in the middle of nowhere, so it was a long time before DSL came through here, and even now we don't have any options other than DSL.

It's funny how "OMG FAST" the internet seemed when we got 768kbps DSL here, and then after a while we got 3Mbps and it seemed like the fastest thing in the world. Now I can't stand how slow it is. I think it's just a combination of perception (especially since we have FiOS where I work), and the fact that download sizes have just ballooned nowadays - I can't even think about downloading a game on Steam on my home connection without it taking like two days, and even patches take hours now.

Until now my internet speed still in 2mbps and downloading games takes days or weeks depends on size

killer150 said:

Until now my internet speed still in 2mbps and downloading games takes days or weeks depends on size

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That's still "broadband" in some sense though. At least it's not 256k, which is typically the lowest level speed for DSL :)

At home, I've had dial-up far longer than most people here... from March 2002 all the way to May 2013-just over 11 years! By about 2008-09, downloads began ballooning in size so much, that waiting for things to finish took forever and was frustrating. By the time we finally got off of dial-up, it took many of the pages that I frequent several minutes to finish loading.
One reason why it took so long for our household to abandon dial-up was the cost of broadband service. Although cable is available in my area, I chose DSL through my ILEC (Frontier) instead, thinking I'd get a better deal. Needless to say, the cable provider in my area (Charter) is bottom-of-the-barrel just like Frontier. There are a couple of WISPs serving my area, but I can't get a signal where I'm am, and those providers are bottom-of-the-barrel too. That's what you get for not living in a major city (and by "major city", I mean New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, not has-beens like Detroit and Flint.) Of course, DSL doesn't qualify as broadband anymore according to Obama's FCC, which is beholden to the cable companies.
I know, I should have Charter like everybody else around me (60Mbps vs. 6 for Frontier), but I've heard many complaints about them, and I've had trouble with their service going down at my work, where I've had to unplug and plug back in the cable modem.

Oh my gosh, I haven't used dial up in years. A lotta years. 10 or 12. Though, for the last few years we used it we had a dedicated phone line so that it was always connected and wouldn't tie up our home phone when people called.

I do remember back in the day we would keep in mind not to stay online too long, because we knew it tied up the phone. So I would use it for an hour or two, and then my mom would use it for an hour or two. Eventually we downloaded a program that would trigger a pop up when someone called, so that you could disconnect and answer the phone. lol Sometimes we were like "Nah bruh", because we were in the middle of something online and didn't wanna spent an hour connecting again after the phone call.

If I really had to, I would go back to dial up as opposed to nothing, but if given the choice, ew heck naw.

That annoying dial up modem brings me back memories.
My family's first computer (windows me) only supported the old style dial up, no ethernet port.

I hated that it used up the phone line, everytime my mom, my uncle, or my grandma needed the phone, I had to disconnect from the internet - my early 2000's memory.

I used dial-up for about half a year in 2012 because it was all I had available to me (it's free where I live if you can find a local number and I didn't have the money for broadband and my Dad wouldn't pay). Dial-up has only gotten much worse since the 90s; most websites now expect you to have a connection that can handle a bunch of bloat being thrown at it. It's really terrible. There are some ways to survive, though.

Here's my advice to anyone who ever has to use it in the modern era:
- make effective use of adblock; use the annoyance and social filters in addition to the normal ones and consider using this (which I use anyway because it's awesome)
- you may want to consider Opera, as it has the ability to only load non-cached images on demand built-in (Firefox/Pale Moon can replicate this with ImgLikeOpera, which still works really well but isn't quite as good as Opera's built-in options) and "turbo mode," which compresses data before sending it out
- in addition to selective image loading, you'll also want something that lets you selectively load plugin content, such as FlashBlock for Firefox/Pale Moon
- use mobile versions of websites where possible, e.g. htps://m.facebook.com/
- find some good single-player games or games with a decent single-player mode, download them at McDonald's or Starbucks or something and play them at home
- Steam won't start on dial-up unless you put it in offline mode, it just freezes while trying to start; you can set offline mode by disabling your network adapter and trying to start Steam and then pressing the "start in offline mode" button or, alternatively, by going to menus Steam > Go Offline... while in online mode
- GOG is also nice because DRM free means you don't need to worry about starting Steam in offline mode, just run your games directly; you'll still probably have to download on a better connection, though
- some older games' multiplayer works all right on dial-up: UT99, StarCraft, Diablo II, NetHack (via ssh to NAO), but many older games' multiplayer servers are now dead and most newer games require much more than dial-up to be playable
- find some good IRC channels to hang out in, as IRC works great on dial-up; it was, after all, developed in the 1980s

So... In conclusion. Dial up is possible to survive in these modern era. I can use my Nokia C2 ( Bluetooth Modem ) to compare Dial up because the speed is slower than a tortoise.